Capitalism In Crisis: Recent Episodes
Jim Sawyer
The looming crisis of capitalism is inability to sort out self-interest rightly understood, from crass rip-offs that redistribute wealth and power away from America’s most vulnerable citizens.
This is Jim Sawyer for Capitalism in Crisis.org
Fraud always involves deception. With increasing frequency, we are beset by fraud-laced schemes. Remember the Wells-Fargo banking scandal in which two million fake customer accounts were created?
Here’s an even more jaw-dropping example of pseudo-capitalism, from Germany.
A man bombed a soccer team’s bus, allegedly, but first, he rigged the market.... Audio and narration produced by Jim Sawyer. Audio editing by Quincy L. Lewis (Flipside-Ink Publishing)
This is Jim Sawyer for Capitalism in Crisis.org
Wells-Fargo Bank, in April, clawed back an additional $75 million from two executives it now holds accountable for the bank’s five-year sales scandal. As many as two-million fake customer accounts were opened at management’s behest..... Audio and narration produced by Jim Sawyer. Audio edited by Quincy L. Lewis (Flipside-Ink Publishing)
Julia Ward Howe, who penned the Battle Hymn of the Republic—just months after Fort Sumter’s fall—was a writer, poet, abolitionist, social activist and suffragette. To understand Ward Howe, we must understand her contextually, within the turbulent period in which she lived. Truth goes marching on, she exclaimed, profoundly. What a fitting backdrop for reflection upon.....
(Featuring The Battle Hymn of the Republic Penned By Julia Ward Howe//selection not owned by Jim Sawyer)
Communism has evolved. Remember the old Soviet system? It crashed in 1991. In place of markets, Soviets used quotas, fashioned by committees. Never mind what citizens actually wanted—or needed—stuff was chosen for them by bureaucrats, instead. Of course, when the price system is undermined, disastrous consequences may follow. For the Soviet system, economic and political ...
Let’s get down to basics. The Washington swamp must be drained, NOW. Sound familiar? Right out of Donald Trump’s play book? Right out of father’s play book, also. Throw the bums out; in the Sawyer household was a familiar refrain. Fundamentalists like Buss reduce Technicolor-like complexity, to black and white simplicity. The only thing in...
Buss was a complex character. I eavesdropped on father as we were closing our neighborhood store—the night before Christmas—marking the end of the busy shopping season. Just then a man entered, distraught, and engaged Buss clumsily. Next, spontaneously, he exploded in tears. With a large family, he couldn’t afford presents for his kids. Disabled and.....
The perspective of this podcast series is this. The way in which the economy behaves—changes. However, the way ideologues think it ought to behave, stagnates and ossifies. Consequently, doctrinal tweaks are necessary, occasionally, to realign dysfunctional thinking with the way in which the world actually works. Unbridled doctrinaire thinking on the ideological right, especially, has […]
In feudal society, the community common was public space shared by all. Consequently, if a serf allowed his cow to graze on the commons’ lush grasses, his self-interest would be enhanced, but at the expense of his neighbors’ well-being. That is, if every serf turned his cow loose after dark to graze the common, in ...
Over 5300 Wells-Fargo employees lost their jobs even though no senior managers were fired. This isn’t cross-selling…this is fraud.
On Labor Day, let’s consider the Rodney Dangerfield theory of labor. Coined after the now-deceased comedian, this theory along with a winner-take-all perspective may explain why working folks “don’t get no respect” in the labor market.
Where along the bifurcated Red-Blue conservative-liberal political continuum does one place Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump? Is he a pragmatic purple?
This week we try to understand U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump’s response to a Muslim father’s Democratic Convention speech. How do underlying economic paradigms influence political events?
What is the future of American capitalism? Can it lie in consensus decision-making in public spaces about defining what is and what is not productive capital? We explore this through the provocative concept of relative capitalism – setting positive and negative incentives, connected to specific outcomes Americans wish to gain (or avoid).
What does equine capital in a Grandpa farm have to do with Turing Pharmaceuticals and its bid to raise the price of a life-saving drug by 50 times? Exploring pseudo-capitalist acts and their economic consequences…
This week, we discuss the economics and ethics of hedge fund bets on life-saving medication. What’s wrong with companies like Turing Pharmaceuticals owning a tablet and jacking up its price over 50 times overnight?
Science is a process of determining what is reality objectively. But, how do we sift the subjective from the objective for understanding economic propositions?
Stopping Take the Money and Run strategies isn’t working; especially since the pseudo-capitalist inspired Great Recession.
Do you wheel and deal like Donald Trump? Or do you follow Adam Smith’s path toward value creation, to use an asset efficiently over the long haul?
Pseudo-capitalism often presents itself as strategies to drive up the capitalized value of an asset’s annual cash flow, sell, and then take the money and run.
Some develop a knack for turning the housing and finance industries on their heads, into cash cows. This is what the Great Recession was about....
The contemporary challenge is to describe economic reality—crisply—and to isolate fraud, rather than to look the other way....
The appeal of the US presidential candidate Donald Trump’s economic conservatism may lie in the mythological underpinning of the orderliness of market forces. This approach validates one’s social order, provides guidance for so-called right living, and particularly, inspires a sense of awe.
Harsh rhetoric in the 2016 Republican presidential race is a throwback to Frederick Bastiat. Mid-19th Century, he portrayed government as a waster, bungler and obstructer....
The First Glitch of Doctrinal Capitalism is Say’s Law that declares supply creates demand. Consequently, there can be no unsold goods nor unemployment, and therefore no need for government....
Entrepreneurs may rationalize themselves as they segue into pseudo-capitalists whose behavior does not align with the common good...
Fraud is deception; some frauds are legal, and the gray area in which fraud is commonplace is expanding due to doctrinal imprecision about the legitimacy of self-interested behavior....
This podcast series explores legal and illegal frauds, introduced here, including inversions and earnings strippings. Pseudo-capitalist scams thrive on fundamentalism‛s blindness to the actual way in which the economic world works....
J.M. Keynes challenged Smith‛s built in bias toward orderliness. His critique is introduced here, even metaphorically. Fundamentalism‛s advocates are likened to wizards, from Oz, living out of a childhood fairy tale.
Adam Smith patterned economics after physics. In Smith‛s view, capitalist societies constructed upon laissez-faire principles of orderliness, automatically align self-interest with attainment of the common good.....
The way the world works—changes. However the way conventional economists think it ought to work—in an orderly manner—is static, inflexible and too often dysfunctional.
The most grave crisis doctrinaire capitalism is facing early in the 21st Century is mismatch with how the world actually works. This gap also is a vulnerability for justifications of doctrinaire-related rip-offs....
I eavesdropped on father as we were closing our neighborhood store—the night before Christmas—marking the end of the busy shopping season. Just then a man entered, distraught, and engaged Buss clumsily. Next, spontaneously, he exploded in tears...
Historically, Utahns espouse Enlightenment values of political liberty, free markets, limited government, responsibility and personal initiative. As the political right sees it, this is their turf.
Even so, this conservative Mormon state turned liberal in 1932, then stayed there until Dwight Eisenhower’s election two decades later. Not so for Father.....
Buss was a redneck, I suppose. Still, I want to be fair to father’s memory.
I called him Buss. My paternal grandfather demanded we call him Dad. So, Buss was sort of a leftover name—one he accepted to keep peace across the generations.
Buss no doubt voted against his economic self-interest—and against the interest of his kids’ futures—repeatedly. Were he still around for the 2016 election, I’m quite sure he would have pulled the lever for Donald Trump......
It’s NOT the economy, stupid, says Alan Blinder, former Federal Reserve second-in-command. Instead, the 500-pound gorilla in the room is less economic and more political; political gridlock, that is.
While forces on the left are not immune, the huge problem lies with congressional Republicans who block almost everything and propose almost nothing. Nope. Negatory. HELL NO! Indeed, in their widespread opposition to Barak Obama, what they are opposing is…well…modernity.
Republican Donald Trump’s mantra “Make America Great Again” captures widespread angst about failed personal opportunities impacting aging white guys who didn’t make it to college. But consumer surveys report something quite different .......